


Safety in Numbers

by scioscribe



Category: Scream (Movies)
Genre: Antagonistic Friends to Lovers, Cunnilingus, F/F, First Time, Road Trips, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 17:20:28
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28310775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: “Come on,” Gale said, her voice softer now. “It’s a couple weeks of your time, max. We put snow tires on my car, and we drive around the Wonderland Killer’s stomping grounds. Stay in some shitty motels, interview some yokels who’ll probably stare at our tits. Drink bad diner coffee. And whenever you feel like bowing out, you’re out, no questions asked. You want another selling point? It’s all on the publisher’s dime, and I’ll cut you a share of the advance, too. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use the money.”She could use the money. What she didn’t want was the notoriety. Sidney Prescott, the two-time victim.“And let me guess,” she said. “All you want is to put my name on the cover. Probably not a co-author credit—I’m thinking part of the subtitle.On the Trail of the Wonderland Killer: A Journey with Ghostface Survivor Sidney Prescott.”
Relationships: Sidney Prescott/Gale Weathers
Comments: 5
Kudos: 30
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Safety in Numbers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snickfic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snickfic/gifts).



> Set after _Scream 2_ , AU before _Scream 3_ , though I did keep Sidney having a house in the woods.

“I know,” Gale said when Sidney opened the door. “Me of all people, here of all places, right?”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Sidney considered staying in the doorway, shoulders squared, and arms akimbo considered trying to seem and feel like a force to be reckoned with. But in the end, she stepped back, turning aside, and let Gale in. “I always figured you’d show up sooner or later. Kinda thought it would be for some kind of creepy anniversary interview, though.”

“Maybe I’m getting a head start. I’m industrious.”

She looked coolly out of place in Sidney’s battered living room, furnished from about a dozen different rummage sales and thrift shops; she looked out of place next to Sidney, who had her hair up in a messy low ponytail and was in sweatpants and a flannel shirt. Gale was lacquered—she’d always had that vibe to her, a feeling of cheap, bitten nail polish or perfectly shellacked hair or some slick and priceless piece straight out of a museum. She’d changed her hair since the last time Sidney had seen her, since those heavy streaks of black and cherry she’d had at Windsor. She still had it bobbed, though—just glossy dark brown. God only knew if that was her natural color or not.

She was industrious, all right, and she wrote fast. Always the first one out with a book.

Actually, she wrote fast enough that if all she wanted was to do some bullshit reunion piece, she wouldn’t have to start it now, months ahead of time. And she’d know better than to give Sidney this much time to say no.

Sidney wasn’t going to ask. She said, “Do you want a drink?”

“God, yes,” Gale said, following her back into the kitchen. She was slipping off her shoes as she walked; Sidney heard the clunk of them behind her. “I basically had to drive through the set for _Deliverance_ to get here.”

“Gosh, you could have just not come.” And she’d meant iced tea or a Coke, anyway, because having drinks with Gale hadn’t exactly been on her to-do list, but she got a couple bottles of beer out of the fridge anyway.

Gale toasted her with a little flick of her wrist and then tilted the bottle back. She wiped her lips dry. “Well, we’re off to a good start if you haven’t hit me in the face yet.”

“And you haven’t sprung anything on me,” Sidney said. “I have the feeling that’s coming, though.”

“Yeah, I’m waiting for you to put the bottle down.”

Sidney shrugged. “You should have thought of that before you agreed to drinks.”

Gale looked her over, appraising her like they didn’t already know everything important about each other, like she hadn’t driven a hundred miles just to stand in Sidney’s kitchen and drink some overpriced microbrew.

“You’re probably right.” Gale put her drink down on the counter. “I’m writing a book about the Wonderland Killer. I want you to help me with the research.”

“Wow.” Sidney felt a kind of incredulous anger swelling up in her, like someone blowing a bubble of molten glass. “I seriously can’t believe you. I was prepared for just some shlocky interview request, maybe some kind of bizarre, fucked-up trauma reenactment, but—”

“Two serial killer survivors uncover all the sordid crimes of yet another serial killer,” Gale said. “Do you realize how nuts people will go for that angle?”

“There is something clinically wrong with you,” Sidney said flatly. “I’m not diving back into all that crap just to spike your book sales. You came all this way for nothing.” She’d meant to say, _and you need to get the fuck out of my house_ , and God, how lonely was she that it hadn’t come out that way? Gale was—well, Gale was someone she’d gone through hell with twice, someone she’d liked for ten minutes on round one and fifteen on round two; she was a shark who’d do anything for her precious ratings and book sales. And she was one of the handful of people Sidney actually felt safe with. She'd missed her.

With just about anybody else, she wouldn’t have gotten pissed. She’d have gotten _terrified_ , probably wound up with her back pressed against the wall like Gale was going to come at her with a knife.

So maybe the reason she hadn’t asked Gale to get out was because she didn’t want her to. She just wanted to be the normal, sane, undamaged kind of person whose outrage would just be _outrage_ , not a welcome reminder that she could still feel totally human.

“Come on,” Gale said, her voice softer now. “It’s a couple weeks of your time, max. We put snow tires on my car, and we drive around the Wonderland Killer’s stomping grounds. Stay in some shitty motels, interview some yokels who’ll probably stare at our tits. Drink bad diner coffee. And whenever you feel like bowing out, you’re out, no questions asked. You want another selling point? It’s all on the publisher’s dime, and I’ll cut you a share of the advance, too. Don’t tell me you couldn’t use the money.”

She could use the money. What she didn’t want was the notoriety. Sidney Prescott, the two-time victim.

“And let me guess,” she said. “All you want is to put my name on the cover. Probably not a co-author credit—I’m thinking part of the subtitle. _On the Trail of the Wonderland Killer: A Journey with Ghostface Survivor Sidney Prescott._ ”

“Please, that’s way too long. Art design would bitch and moan about it.” She bit her lower lip, and Sidney ended up looking at her lipstick. Burgundy, a little too dark against what was just a barely maintained midwinter tan. “I won’t use your name on the cover if I can mention it in press releases. _And_ throw it in as part of a chapter title.”

“You’re acting like we’re negotiating.”

“Like I said, you haven’t messed up my face yet. Maybe I’m taking that as a go-ahead.” Gale took another drink. “Usually I think these little no-name beers are for shit, but this one’s not bad. Look, Sidney, this isn’t like Billy Loomis or his mother or Mickey Whoever-the-Fuck. You’re not prey. You’re the _predator_ , the initiator. The Wonderland Killer’s already behind bars—he’s not after you. He hasn’t snaked into your life. First he was up in off-season resort land living out his dream of killing townies, and now he’s in prison. Don’t you want to be on the other side for once? Help shine a light on the sickos? Sidney Prescott, survivor—meet Sidney Prescott, avenger.”

Sidney looked at her for a second and then drank, gulping it down until she was breathless and her head was pounding. “God, you’re full of it.”

Gale smiled, perfect white teeth on burgundy. “Everybody has to be, sweetheart, if they ever want to get anywhere.”

“Don’t call me sweetheart.” She felt like she was watching herself from the outside. Real life horror’s favorite Final Girl makes stupid decision yet again. She was really going to do this, wasn’t she?

If she didn’t, it wasn’t like Gale would stop. She’d just go do it on her own. She’d dive headfirst into every bad memory she had, and she’d do it alone if Sidney didn’t go with her.

“Okay.” She took a deep breath. She was relaxed, she realized, or at least as relaxed as she’d ever been over the last few years. “I’m in.”

* * *

Gale drove an incredibly practical, incredibly messy car: it was like all the messiness she’d groomed out of her sleek persona had shown up here instead. Receipts were jammed into the coin holder—gas, McDonald’s salad, tampons and aspirin, Wendy’s baked potato and chili (she couldn’t picture Gale eating chili)—and fast food napkins were all over the floor, damp now where they’d both tracked in snow. The backseat was littered with Wonderland crap—blurry Xeroxes of newspaper coverage, photo reproductions, a map of the area. The car smelled like Gale’s perfume, green apple and musk, tartly sweet and heady.

Sidney liked it.

“Would you stop leafing through my receipts?” Gale said.

“I thought I was entertaining myself. It’s not like we were in the middle of some great conversation.”

“I’m trying not to get us killed driving out of here.” She hit the windshield wipers again, notching them up to a faster setting. “Fucking snow. Turn on the radio.”

Sidney shook her head. “It’s all AM televangelists up here.”

“That’s fun.”

“You really are nervous,” Sidney said, taking in Gale’s whitened knuckles and the way she was hunched forward over the steering wheel. “Sorry, I—I guess I just thought you were complaining about how I had to move to the boonies. It’s okay, you know: the road widens out in just another mile or so. Then we get on a state road, and they’re better about keeping those clear.”

Gale glanced over at her, a touch of surprise in her face. “Thanks.” She exhaled. “I don’t like these bullshit country roads. Macher’s house, you know. I crashed into a bunch of trees.”

“I know. It’s in your book.”

“Yeah. Well, you can’t believe everything you read, even by me. It wasn’t as fun as I made it sound.”

She relaxed a little once they were out on the open road, and Sidney thought it was safe to say, “So I don’t really know that much about the Wonderland Killer. I’ve been giving most of the murder-related headlines a pretty wide berth over the last couple of years.”

“Can’t imagine why.” She stroked her thumbs along the wheel as if she was gathering her thoughts, smoothing them out. “Okay. Carson Renault, the Wonderland Killer—the name’s short for Winter Wonderland, so enjoy having that stuck in your head for the next few days. Somebody still owns the song, so officially, it’s always just Wonderland, never _Winter_ Wonderland. Music companies are lawsuit-happy.”

“That’s not really the part I care about.”

She’d expected Gale to sound like she did on TV, once Sidney got her into talking about the case, but Gale just went on sounding like herself: crisp and matter-of-fact and just a little too invested to be totally normal. “He worked up in Maine. During the summer, it’s Vacationland. During the winter, it’s a frozen hellscape. There are all these little towns that basically live off the summer tourists, and in winter they close down to like one general store run by a toothless guy named Sparky. Winter was when Renault really buckled down and got to work—a fact I’m sure the Maine Board of Tourism was secretly very happy about. You can sweep a few dead locals under the rug as long as the money doesn’t start dying off.”

“They’re probably not too thrilled about you drawing attention to it, then.”

“Yeah, I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but I tend to piss a lot of people off just by showing up.”

Sidney smiled.

“Anyway, they’ll live. It’s already gotten some coverage anyway. Just not the good, juicy kind.”

“How did he kill them?” Sidney said. “The off-season locals.”

“He mixed it up. That was part of the problem, initially. Season-long gaps between killings, different methods, no real signature—it took a couple years for anyone to realize the deaths were connected. Luckily for everyone else, Renault has feet like a bear, and there are only so many supersized footprints you can find at crime scenes before you start putting the pieces together.”

“Thank God for big feet.”

“And yet, I still think I’m going to find a way to imply he’s got a tiny dick. Anyway, various methods. Chainsaw, gunshot. One man fell through a frozen lake and drowned in nothing but boxer shorts, another one had a so-called hunting accident with an arrow through the throat—"

Sidney leaned forward and cranked the heat up like that would stop the shiver that had just run through her. Arrow through the throat—that was how Kevin Bacon had died in the first _Friday the 13 th_. She still had all that crap floating around in her head, thanks to Randy—who probably would have been able to give her a dozen reasons not to do what she was doing right now, who would have told her she was getting herself back into sequel territory.

“—hatchet to the back of the head, doused with kerosene and—”

“I get the picture. And why you didn’t tell me any of that before we left.”

“Yeah, I wasn’t going to lead with the most gruesome parts. Sue me.”

“Only if you use the phrase ‘Winter Wonderland.’”

Gale looked over at her again, her dark eyebrows arched.

“What?” Sidney said.

“Nothing. I was just realizing that I think this is probably the longest we’ve ever talked.”

“The longest we’ve ever talked or just the longest I’ve ever gone without—” She mimed socking herself in the jaw.

“Both. And the longest I’ve gone without pissing you off.”

“Oh, you’ve pissed me off. I was plenty mad back at the house.” She stretched, tugging at the seatbelt until it loosened. She breathed in that car smell again, warm and foggy with perfume, like Christmas in a department store. “I don’t actually go around punching people in the face, you know. We both probably have some skewed ideas about how we act, you know, normally. In regular circumstances.”

And now they were on a serial killer-themed fact-finding road trip, so she guessed that wasn’t going to change any time soon.

“I’ve interviewed people who would say that means we know each other better, not worse,” Gale said. Her smile softened her mouth. “And by that I mean Dewey. I’ve interviewed Dewey. I think he read his way through a couple self-help books that were big on trauma bonding.”

“And you guys aren’t together anymore,” Sidney said. “So my point stands.”

“We didn’t go our separate ways because I couldn’t remember the name of his childhood dog.”

“It was a cat,” Sidney said. “Mr. Snuffles.” Tatum had named him.

“Oh my God. No wonder I blocked that out.” She changed lanes, the car skidding just a little; her country back-road trauma didn’t seem to matter on the highway, because she just steered into it smoothly and kept going. “Anyway, for all you know, we’re not together _because_ we knew each other too well. Maybe I have that effect on people.”

“I’d buy that, sure.”

“See, by this point in our relationship, now I know you can be a smart-ass when you want to be. A little broody, sarcastic Daria. I like it.”

“Even if you think you already knew all the important stuff?” She hooked her fingers into air-quotes around the last two words.

“I know you’re tough,” Gale said. “Brave. Sharp. Loyal.”

Not loyal enough to have untied the guy who’d serenaded her on a dining hall table. Not loyal enough to have saved his life. Something curdled in Sidney’s stomach. It felt like she was moving away from herself, leaving her body in Gale’s passenger seat while she receded back down some unlit hallway. This was a spot of light far away, and she was far away from it, darkness crowding in around her. She made her lips move even though they felt stiff, almost frostbitten: “I think I’ll just sleep for a while, if it wouldn’t bother you. I can take a turn driving later if you want.”

Gale’s gaze flitted over to her for a second. Her face looked a little too careful. It wasn’t a good idea, Sidney had to remember, to give too much away in front of someone who could be pretty ruthless about using it. She didn’t want her bad memories becoming a footnote in Gale’s new book.

“Sure,” Gale said.

Sidney closed her eyes and tilted her head back. She listened to the hard, squeaky growl of them moving over the snowy road. If she were still a kid, she could be out there right now, waiting to catch a snowflake on her tongue. Her mom would be out there too, her long hair getting matted with frost. She’d never remembered to wear a hat, even when she’d been shoving Sidney’s down over her ears. And Tatum. Tatum would be there too.

That was the other end of the long, dark hallway, and it was why she couldn’t get herself to give it up. What did she have waiting for her at _this_ end, the so-called right end? Not a whole hell of a lot.

She breathed in.

 _Citrus_ , she thought suddenly. That was something else in Gale’s perfume. Not quite lemon, not quite orange, but somewhere in there.

After a while, she fell asleep.

* * *

“Wow,” Sidney said as they pulled in. “You weren’t kidding about the bad motels.”

The Stop-n-Sleep was a low-slung yellow brick building with chipped paint on all the room doors; Sidney parked them in front of a busted NO VACANCY sign where the NO was flickering frenetically, as though it sensed somebody teasingly moving the place’s last room key back and forth across the counter.

“This? This is nothing. You can’t even see a drug deal going on in the parking lot.” Gale unsnapped her seatbelt. “How do you feel about sharing a room?”

“Why? I thought your publisher was paying for all of it.”

“They are, but they’ll be more generous in the long run if I don’t take them to the cleaners right away. And—” She hesitated.

The car was still running, the heater still blasting them, the radio playing: _So don’t try to deny it, pretty baby. You’ve been down so long you can hardly see._ She’d danced to that with Billy once. Her eyes were dry, and she just wanted to go to bed.

“—and I could take or leave being alone,” Gale said finally. “If we’re being honest with each other.”

“Me too.” She smiled, and Gale smiled back. “So sure. I don’t mind being roomies.”

She hadn’t had another roommate after Hallie. She’d requested singles, and she’d gotten them. Her best guess was that someone in Windsor College’s legal department hadn’t been crazy about the liability issues of assigning someone to be Sidney Prescott’s roommate.

They checked into Room 7—the number loose and hanging upside-down, making it Room L. It had two double beds—Sidney wasn’t even sure they were wide enough to count as queens—with stiff orange bedspreads; Sidney’s crinkled when she sat down on it. The carpet was worn threadbare in a couple of places and everything smelled like kind of like cigarettes, but it was clean enough. At least the streaks on the mirror and bathroom countertop were signs that somebody had wiped them down sometime.

And Sidney actually liked the art. Stark black-and-white nature closeups, wintery ones that turned bare tree branches into black, inky spikes against the white snow, like calligraphy.

She was looking at one of the photos when Gale came out of the bathroom, dressed in creamy white silk pajamas, button-ups with an actual breast pocket.

“They’re pretty,” Sidney said, gesturing to the pictures.

“As cold as I am right now, I’d like them a lot better if they were something tropical.” She peeled back her bedspread and slid underneath the covers, her back braced against the headboard. “So, as your almost-employer, should I ask how your first day’s going?”

“All we’ve done is drive and check into a motel. After you threw all my stuff into a bag for me.”

“You weren’t moving that fast and I didn’t want to give you time to change your mind.”

“The first day’s okay,” Sidney said. “It’s—nice to be out of the house, sort of.”

Gale’s gaze was a little too sharp. “Haven’t done much of that lately?”

She could get sharp back, if that was what they were doing. “Is this off the record?”

“If you want it to be.”

“I do. Not that you don’t probably already know it all, anyway. I mean, I’m not stupid, I know you talk to Dewey.”

“Anything I heard from him can be off the record too,” Gale said, which surprised Sidney a little.

It seemed nicer not to say that. She tucked her knees up to her chest and put her arms around them, hugging herself close. “No, I don’t get out of the house much. Most of my work is stuff I can do over the phone, so it’s mostly just… grocery shopping. My dad comes to visit sometimes. So does Dewey. Cotton, but just the once. That was—weird.” She hesitated. “You had my address.”

“And I came by.”

“Yeah, two years after I moved there.” She wriggled down, putting her head on the pillow, and then reached over and switched off her bedside lamp.

Gale turned hers off too. It was dark when she said, “I’m sorry.” There was just the light from the headlights passing by on the highway, there and then gone.

Instead of good night, Sidney said, “It’s good to see you again.”

“Yeah,” Gale said softly. “You too.”

* * *

Most of the days blurred together. One little snowy town turned into the next. Sidney couldn’t decide if she found these places beautiful or spooky—they could have been Christmas villages, all the roofs trimmed with snow like icing piped on gingerbread houses, but they were practically ghost towns, too. The people who were still hanging around were tense and taciturn, drawn in tight in a way Sidney knew from the inside-out. Nobody wanted them there. And it wasn’t even just that they were there to poke around, because it happened everywhere, even where they weren’t asking questions, even at pit stops in places where no one had died. They were just strangers. It was weirdly refreshing, in a way, to have a bunch of people turn around and stare at her because they _didn’t_ know who she was.

Sidney worked out pretty quickly that the safest thing to order in any given roadside diner was some kind of breakfast food. Pancakes, hash browns, eggs sunny-side up, toast—all hard to mess up.

“You should try this,” she said one morning, pushing her cinnamon roll at Gale. She’d been breaking off bits of it, and there was still half left. The glaze was all melty and perfect, sticky-sweet. “I’m tired of watching you eat fruit cups.”

“Yeah, talk to me when you’re on the other side of thirty,” Gale said. “Your metabolism will slow down.” She still tore off a piece of the cinnamon roll, though. When she popped it in her mouth, her eyes dropped half-closed. “God, that’s good.”

“Have the rest of it.” She found herself looking at the thumbprint Gale had left in the glaze. There was a little shiny smudge of it on her lips, too. “Besides, you’re in, like, ridiculously good shape. There’s no way you don’t know that.”

Especially with the way all the cops they interviewed ogled Gale the moment they walked in. Sure, they looked at Sidney too, but they didn’t start slavering over her like cartoon wolves, and when they looked at Gale, it was like their tongue rolled out and hit the floor. Sidney understood it, too. It was part of Gale’s smooth, bold TV _thing_ , the way she crashed into your life like she was the only person in it in full-color. She had this way of seeming like some kind of sleek journalist Barbie, Malibu-tanned, totally styled, so precision-made that her feet were naturally shaped for high heels.

She did it on purpose, Sidney knew. Mostly, anyway. It was like she was an actress playing Gale Weathers in some future biopic, selling every character trait just a little bit too hard.

She was cooler than that, really. Cooler and messier and braver, in ways those drooling idiots in Middle of Nowhere PD would ever get.

Gale said, “Okay, if you’re twisting my arm.” She took another bite and—exaggeratedly, Sidney thought, half-fondly and half-critically, like she was in some kind of bizarro media analysis class—moaned around it.

She wasn’t wearing much eye makeup that morning, and Sidney could see how delicate her eyelids looked as they fluttered, the way the skin smoothed out.

She ignored what she was really looking at and focused on the moan instead. “Is that your orgasm face?”

The question made her face heat up, but it was at least less awkward and weird than _I really like your eyelids._

Gale laughed a little. “I doubt it. Not my real one, anyway.”

“I think I just kind of clench my jaw really hard,” Sidney said, without meaning to at all.

Gale’s mouth curved. “I can picture that.”

Of course, most of those orgasms were by herself. She hadn’t really done that much, not since Derek.

Their waitress came around with more coffee, and the conversation slid away to all the usual stuff: Wonderland, where they were going next, survivor interviews, victim family interviews. They’d already visited the actual towns where the Wonderland Killer had struck—five towns, eight victims whose names Sidney tried hard to memorize—and now all that was left were the unincorporated areas, even smaller and even more rural. Kind of like Sidney’s own chosen hideaway. Being isolated hadn't saved them, though: it had just made them prime stalking territory for Renault. The houses were spaced too far apart from each other for the screams to carry.

She thought that when all this was over, she was going to have to move.

Gale made a blue X on the map. “We might as well tackle this one next.”

“What’s that one?”

“The guy who was killed with the chainsaw. He has a brother who still lives in the area, and he’ll answer a few questions.”

Sidney rolled her eyes. “He might like it better if you called his brother by his name. Chainsaw guy is Zack Cross, by the way.”

“See, that’s one of the reasons I brought you along. Don’t you like being the voice of empathy, Jiminy Cricket?” She dug in her bag and came up with a manila folder with a neon orange file flag stuck on it. “Actually, I should probably finish your cinnamon roll before I have to look at these pictures again.”

Sidney hadn’t been able to make herself look at them the first time around. She said quietly, “How do you do it?”

Gale finished the cinnamon roll. She didn’t pretend she didn’t know what Sidney was talking about. “I don’t like it. I know you think I’m some kind of sociopath, but it was never actually easy to see any of this. And now—” She exhaled. “Now I hate it. But not as much as I hate the idea of not being able to do my job. So I power through.”

“I don’t think you’re a sociopath.” She tried a weak smile. “Probably wouldn’t have shared my cinnamon roll with you if I did.”

“That’s true,” Gale said. She didn’t look especially comforted.

Sidney wasn’t even sure she needed to be comforted, but she wanted to try anyway. She didn’t want Gale to think that Sidney still thought of her the way she had when she was a kid.

“You were right about Cotton,” she said. “I never really said that. I never really appreciated it, because the whole thing was just such a nightmare and—and it was easier to have my mom’s death be ‘Maureen Prescott’s murder’ and not ‘the first Ghostface killing.’ Just another way Billy screwed me, I guess. It’s just always been easier to look back at you and your book and think that you were calling me a liar, that you were some trashy journalist trying to ruin my life and my mom’s reputation. But you were right. You were the one trying to get an innocent man out of prison, and I was the one hiding from the truth.”

“You weren’t that wrong. Sure, I wasn’t trying to ruin your life. But I didn’t go out of my way to look after you, either. And it’s not like I wasn’t thinking about ratings and book sales every step of the way.” Their eyes met, and Sidney tried to push away how it made her feel. Gale’s eyes were a crazily vivid blue-green, the kind of color Sidney had always figured was enhanced for TV. “Sometimes the human angle isn’t my strong suit. Like I said, that’s one of the reasons I wanted you to come with me.”

“What were some of the other reasons?”

Gale shrugged. She looked uncomfortable, suddenly, like she was made up of nothing but wrong angles. “I liked the idea of us working together.” She took a long drink of her coffee and seemed to have made some kind of decision by the time she put it down. “And I’d been thinking about you enough that I figured I’d feel less crazy if you were actually here. You don’t need to see a shrink because you keep thinking about your road trip buddy.” She ate a wedge of underripe cantaloupe out of her fruit cup and added, “Not as much, anyway. Let’s call it a more survivable kind of crazy.”

She said all this with her face just immobile enough for Sidney to see the tension there, and she had an idea she knew why Gale was really telling her this. Sidney had been trying to give her good person points, and Gale was pretty much turning them down flat.

She thought it would make some kind of difference to Sidney that her motives weren’t—what, pure? Totally and one hundred percent professional? Healthy and sane?

 _I was living out in the middle of the woods,_ Sidney could have said. _I ran away from my whole life. And half the time, the only people who really mean anything to me are you and Dewey, and you were gone and I hated you for it._

_And lately I’ve been thinking I want to sleep with you, so that’s a fun thing to have in the mix._

She said, “I’m pretty familiar with survivable kinds of crazy.”

“All right.” Gale’s eyes were still on hers, and Sidney couldn’t read her expression. “Then that works out, doesn’t it?”

“Sure.” She cleared her throat. “So are we looking at the cabin where Zack Cross died, or are we just talking to his brother?”

It was a hell of a subject change, but Gale rolled with it. She was one of the only people who would have; they were both stuck living lives where murder was never very far from their minds anyway. “Both. The cabin’s still on the market, and the realtor gave me the combination to a lockbox on the doorstep that should have the key in it. She said we can let ourselves in because, and I quote, she ‘doesn’t like being in the murder cabin anyway.’ With that kind of can-do spirit, it’s almost amazing she hasn’t sold the place yet. A monkey in a blazer could do a better job. Talking to the brother’s bound to be more stressful, so I thought we’d do that first.”

“And he knows we’re coming,” Sidney said. She couldn’t exactly stop Gale from springing surprise interviews on people, but she wasn’t going to be a part of it. She’d stayed behind for most of the family and survivor interviews so far.

“He does. More or less.”

“Okay, how is that a ‘more or less’ situation?”

“He knows I’m writing a book about the case. Unless he’s an idiot, he has to know that means I could show up.”

“And by not calling ahead, you make sure he doesn’t have any way to say no.”

“I make sure he doesn’t have any _easy_ way to say no,” Gale said sharply. “He can still slam the door in my face if he wants to. I’m five-five and my muscles all from aerobics, I’m not going to break down a door.”

There was a funny bubble of emotion inside Sidney, like she knew she should have been angry and knew she really wasn’t. She felt her lips twitch. “I slammed the door in your face a couple of times.”

Gale smiled. “Yeah, you did.”

Sidney couldn’t look at her smile for too long, so she looked at her plate instead. She still had two strips of bacon left on her plate, but they’d gone cold now, and she didn’t think she wanted them anymore. What she wanted was the cinnamon roll taste that had to be on Gale’s lips, in her mouth.

She didn’t have to live on the moral high ground. Gale had the right to do her job, and it wasn’t like being rude made her a monster. “I can go along with ‘more or less.’”

* * *

Eddie Cross had a slightly rusted chain-link fence with a few holes in it, and Sidney knew the second she saw it that he’d made it look that way on purpose. He’d let it rust and go without repair because it enhanced the bright orange NO TRESPASSING sign. It made the place look more intimidating. She knew she was just guessing—though a psychic brother-sisterhood between people like them definitely would have come in handy—but it felt right. It was what she would have done. And the rest of Eddie’s yard and house was well-maintained. His driveway and the path to his porch were both shoveled, his gutters were cleaned out, firewood was neatly stacked.

He was just a guy living his life, and he didn’t want random people butting into it.

And when she saw all that, she should have just stayed in the car. She’d done it before, and the only real downside was that running the heater and radio used up so much gas Gale always made her pay to fill up the tank afterwards. She could live with that.

But she felt a weird connection with Eddie Cross, even though ninety percent of it had to be bullshit. The way he was living made her think of what her life had been before Gale had swept back into. She’d needed a little sweeping. Maybe he did too. Maybe they could help him.

 _You played a couple Greek tragedies,_ she thought. _You’d think you’d know what hubris was._

But she stayed at Gale’s side anyway, crossing the drive and going up onto Eddie’s porch.

Gale’s cheeks were flushed pink with the cold. She was wearing a green knit cap, pulled down low over her ears, and it drowned out the blue in her eyes and just left the green, emerald and sparkling. She was happy Sidney was here.

Sidney reached out and grabbed her hand suddenly, just for a second, before she dropped it like it had burned her.

What was she doing? Did she really want to do this?

Eddie Cross opened the door. He was in his late forties, with a cleft chin and messy black hair and a red flannel shirt. He looked like a romance novel lumberjack, which made it all the more surreal that she was standing on his doorstep having some kind of sexual crisis.

Gale wasn’t thrown by any of it, thankfully. She held out her hand. “Mr. Cross? I’m Gale Weathers.”

“The woman writing the book.” He didn’t take her hand.

She lowered it, and if she was fazed by that, she didn’t show it. “This is my associate, Sidney Prescott.”

“Hi,” Sidney said quietly. She was probably better off not trying for the handshake.

Eddie scrutinized her. It was like she was some kind of advanced robot, something he hadn’t known really existed yet outside of a lab. “You’re the Ghostface girl.”

She hated it when people called her that, and something inside her flared up, ugly and hot like a rash. “Only as much as you’re the Wonderland guy.”

He pressed his lips together and then stepped back. “You might as well come in. You’re letting all the heat out.”

“Thanks,” Gale said. They stepped inside.

Sidney’s mind felt like a shaky Jenga tower about to fall over. She carefully knocked the snow off her boots. It didn’t seem safe to take them off—this seemed like the kind of conversation where you’d want the ability to make a quick getaway. He wasn’t exactly inviting them to settle down and put their feet up. Gale left hers on too. Sidney sat down close to the fire, and the off-balance feeling kept trucking along just fine. She was cold all down one side and warm on the other. She wondered if Eddie Cross cut the wood for his fire himself and if that was hard for him, given how his brother had died. Maybe he always used an ax and not a chainsaw.

She didn’t know she was going to say anything until she did, too loudly. “Gale was a Woodsboro survivor too, you know. And at Windsor College. She was there covering the murders, and the killers targeted her too.”

“Is that a fact,” Eddie said.

“It is,” Gale said. She took out her notepad and flexed her fingers a few times, warming them up. “Sidney wants you to know that I’ve been through all this too, so you won’t think I’m heartless, asking you to talk about your brother. But the fact is, it’s not the same. You lost your brother. Sidney lost her mother, her best friend, and later her boyfriend and her roommate. I lost my cameraman. Now, I liked my cameraman, but it’s not on the same scale. I can’t pretend that we have anything in common.”

But they did. They had to. It was fucked up to listen to Gale say that she was outside some club that Sidney and Eddie were both in. Gale had lived through Woodsboro and Windsor. She’d gotten bloodied and scarred and scared out of her mind.

Losing her mother—or losing Tatum and Hallie and Derek and even, in a messed-up way, Billy—that made a difference, but Sidney wasn’t sure it was that big. She could live with her grief. It was her fear that had warped her for good.

She bit her tongue to keep from saying any of that. Gale was getting what she wanted, Sidney could see that. Eddie Cross was relaxing a little now that Gale had said she wasn’t going to challenge him in the damage sweepstakes. He still didn’t offer them drinks or even tell them to take their coats off, but his jaw was a little less tight.

Gale took her coat off anyway. Like Eddie wouldn’t kick her out if she looked like she was right at home. “I hope the fact that I’m here with Sidney tells you that I can be respectful of what you’re going through.”

Gale was using her. Like a prop.

She wanted to get up and walk out the door. (There, the advantage of keeping your boots on and your coat zipped.) But she wasn’t naïve. This had always been on the table. Who was she kidding? Gale had been upfront about wanting to use her for the press releases, trade off her reputation that way; she might as well do it now too. And Sidney had started it. She’d thrown her support behind Gale when she’d wrapped her up in the Ghostface Survivors banner—it wasn’t unreasonable for Gale to run with it.

She did hate it, though, and it made her hate herself a little. Especially since it was working. Gale had started asking questions, her voice low and calm, and Eddie was answering them. He sounded hesitant, halting, the way you always did when someone wanted the _juicy_ parts, when they were willing to put the screws in to get the real answers, the ones you hadn’t already given a hundred times. Sidney couldn’t listen to too much of it, and she didn’t think she needed to. She’d been a good way to prime the pump, but everything was flowing now. Gale didn’t need her to sit there in silence and look approachably traumatized.

“Excuse me,” she said, standing. “I’m just going to—” She pointed off vaguely: she could have meant _go back to the car_ or _go to the bathroom_ or _leave here and never come back_.

Eddie nodded, distracted, and that was all the confirmation she needed. It would go fine without her.

She went out on the porch and stuck her hands in her pockets, balling them up to keep them warm. She should have taken the car keys, but then her leaving would have been a whole _thing_ , not just her slipping out. She looked at the wet black tree trunks. They reminded her of the painted ones at that first motel. She could smell the snow, clear and cold like the freshest water there was. If she started screaming her head off out here, she wondered who would hear her. Where the nearest neighbor was. Probably not anywhere close—she hadn’t seen much on the way in.

She should do the next stretch of driving, definitely to Zack Cross’s cabin and back. It’d save Gale from having to white-knuckle it through all the woodsy middle of nowhere stuff.

“Sidney?”

Gale’s voice, suddenly behind her, made her tense like she might have to dive off the porch. Hit the snow and start running.

She forced herself out of fight-or-flight mode and turned around. Gale was back in her coat and hat, like they were leaving. How long had she been out here? It didn’t feel like it had been that long. She wasn’t frozen stiff.

“I was just getting some fresh air,” Sidney said. “Are you already done?”

Gale stared at her for a second and then said, “Apparently.” She sounded pissed.

When they got back in the car, the dashboard clock told Sidney she’d been right: they hadn’t been at Eddie Cross’s long at all. Maybe forty-five minutes, which was nothing for the kind of interview Gale had been doing. Sidney had been there for half an hour of it at least. Maybe more.

“Did Eddie clam up after I left?”

“No,” Gale said shortly. She fastened her seatbelt. “I’ll read you the directions to the murder cabin.”

“I just don’t get why you stopped it so early.”

“Because you _disappeared on me_ , all right? You went outside and didn’t come back, and I didn’t know what the fuck was going on. I didn’t know what all this might’ve brought up for you. I didn’t want you to have to be alone.”

She’d cut a great, _emotional_ interview short because she’d been worried about Sidney being out on the porch having a nervous breakdown. Eddie Cross was one of the few people out in close-lipped Yankee territory who’d actually been giving them the kind of raw grief and horror that would make readers care about what had happened up here, the kind of salable pain that Gale’s publisher would eat up with a spoon, and Gale had let their interview end early.

Sidney didn’t think. She just leaned over, the seatbelt digging into her neck, and kissed her.

There was still the faintest trace of sugar on Gale’s lips, but mostly she tasted like stronger things. Black coffee and oranges, like the taste was meant to match the citrusy smell of her. She was pressing back hard against Sidney’s mouth, making it too uncomfortable to be a really great kiss. Sidney didn’t care. She just wanted to breathe her in—she wanted everything Gale had, from the bright nail polish on her fingers to the hard need of her mouth slipping against Sidney’s, their teeth clicking together. Gale in a highlighter-colored suit, back in Woodsboro, irritating the hell of her. Gale standing there with a gun in her hands, offering to rewrite the ending. Gale in the dark, on the other side of a motel room, saying she was sorry she hadn’t come to see her sooner.

They broke apart. Gale’s breath sounded just as ragged as hers. At least they were both the same survivable kind of crazy.

“I want to go back to the motel,” Sidney said. A little steadier than she expected. “I want to sleep with you right now, and I don’t want to do it in the murder cabin.”

“Yeah. Get us the hell out of here.”

Sidney reversed so hard that the tires squealed against the snow, making the car rock. “Shit.”

Gale said, “If you could try not to kill us in the process, that’d be good.”

“Oh, shut up.”

Gale looked goddamn gorgeous in the hard winter sunlight that shouldn’t have been that flattering on anyone. She looked even better when she smiled—and Sidney couldn’t believe that she was smiling for her when she really could have just wrecked them and doubled Gale’s car-related trauma. Her hands were clenched on her knees, but she was smiling.

“I didn’t know if you were interested,” Gale said.

“I’ve never—” This was her pattern today, apparently: trail off and hope somebody else put the pieces together.

Been with a woman. With somebody she needed this badly. With someone she wanted so much she almost crashed the car trying to get to the nearest bed.

She got herself to say a version of that, anyway. “It’s only been a couple of guys. And not recently. You’ll have to give me a learning curve.”

“I doubt it. Not the way you kiss.”

Sidney licked her lips, tasting Gale again. She said, “I’m sorry I messed up your interview. If it helps, I was lying about the fresh air, so you weren’t really wrong. I didn’t want to be in there anymore.”

“Yeah. We can work out some kind of code word for ‘I’m ditching you but I’m still functional’ vs. ‘emergency flare.’” She exhaled. “Later. We’ll do it later. It’s not your fault, Sidney.”

“But I still can’t believe you ended that early. You really must be nuts about me.”

She meant to say it like she was just teasing, but something else crept into her voice instead. Something that gave away that this was the first real thing she’d wanted in a long, long time.

“Pretty much,” Gale said.

* * *

Their motel room was another Room 7, the number upright this time. Lucky number seven.

They both had too many clothes to peel off—all those winter layers. Sidney pulled Gale’s ribbed sweater up over her head only to get confronted with a smooth cotton camisole underneath, creamy white against her tanned skin. She wasn’t even paying attention to what was happening with her own clothes. It wasn’t that she didn’t want to get fucked—she was more aware of her clit than she’d ever been in her life, feeling like she was going to come just from the hard seam of her jeans rubbing against her. But it still felt like a distant second to how much she wanted to see Gale, touch her, taste her.

She’d never felt like this before. She’d never _wanted_. Sex was nice, but she guessed on her side it had always felt—passive. The big thrill had been knowing she was wanted, knowing she could give the guy what he was so desperate to have.

God. That was _nothing_. Being with Gale made her feel uncontrollable. She’d been starved her whole life and now everything was finally on the table.

She unhooked Gale’s bra, and she was so sex-drunk that it felt like a major discovery that there were Gale’s breasts, right there in front of her.

What would feel good? She ran her fingers over the incredibly smooth skin there, obsessed with everything: with the sloping angle, with the exact pink-and-brown shade of Gale’s nipples, which drew up tight and pebbled as Sidney touched them. Sidney lowered her head and licked, almost experimentally, and Gale said, “Fuck,” and rocked into her, like she wanted more of her body to be inside Sidney’s mouth.

Sidney could work with that. She got Gale down on the bed and pulled off her jeans and her underwear. There was that bizarre human puzzle-box discovery again, like she hadn’t known what she was going to find and her brain was stopped completely, deliciously dead by the basic fact of pussy. Gale was waxed smooth down there, having apparently really gone the extra mile to keep Sidney from finding out what her natural hair color was. That almost made her laugh, but she knelt down instead, pressing her trembling lips to the inside of Gale’s thigh.

“It’s higher,” Gale said. “A little to your left.”

“Thanks. I don’t need directions yet.”

She kissed and licked and nibbled her way up Gale’s inner thigh. She had less time than she’d expected to worry about whether or not she was doing this right. Maybe she did seem too hungry, too sloppy, too weirdly appreciative, but screw it. She was supposed to have a learning curve.

She pushed gently at Gale’s other leg and Gale spread her knees out further.

She was rosy pink inside, a deeper pink than her nipples. It wasn’t automatically crazy-hot to Sidney the way Gale’s breasts and legs and mound had been, but it seemed like something she could work with. Then she leaned in and tried kissing Gale there, and Gale made a noise like something inside her had broken, and something she could work with became something she felt fanatical about. Gale tasted good, like a hotter, more intense version of the rest of her skin, a little saltier and muskier as she got wet. Sidney licked at her, running her tongue over Gale’s clit. The taste of her was more intense lower down, and so Sidney moved back and forth, trying different movements—short licks, longer ones, kisses, little circles.

She’d heard Gale’s breathing quicken up above her, but she didn’t really get what it meant until Gale suddenly spasmed against her. And that was _amazing_ —she pushed her thighs together against Sidney like she wanted to trap her there, which sounded pretty good.

At least it sounded pretty good until Gale moved them around and licked up into her. Sidney came absurdly, incredibly quickly—she’d already been on the edge of coming just from going down on Gale. Gale raised up as Sidney came, working her clit with her fingers instead.

“You really do clench your jaw,” she said. She sounded amused but also sort of devoted, like she was memorizing this. “You grind your teeth. You can yell, you know. It wouldn’t be the weirdest thing that ever happened in this motel.”

When Sidney could talk again, she said, “Yeah, well, I didn’t get to see your face at all.”

Gale stretched out beside her and touched her cautiously, her palm against Sidney’s belly, which was a little softer than her own. “Next time. When I’m fully human again. I think you melted my bones.”

 _Next time_. Sidney smiled and turned her head, cuddling up against Gale’s shoulder.

After a moment, Gale said, “Do I have to tell you that this might not be the best idea in the world? We have a lot of fucked-up water under the bridge.”

Sidney had worried about a lot of things in her life, but this wasn’t one of them. “We’ve got compatible damage. I know why you told Eddie what you did, about how what you’d been through couldn’t compare, but it’s not true, Gale. We both know what we need to know. I need that. So do you, or you would have stayed gone. And it’s not even that, it’s just—you.”

And she cared a lot more about good feelings than she did about good ideas, and nothing had ever felt better than this. Maybe it wasn’t the healthiest thing in the world, but she didn’t care. It was better than hiding out in the woods. It was like the cinnamon roll of decisions—maybe not the smartest choice on the menu, but exactly what she wanted and was willing to pay for.

“It’s just you for me too,” Gale said. “I guess that settles it.” She ran her thumb in a circle around Sidney’s navel, and Sidney saw the moment she decided to trust that it was going to be okay, that neither one of them was going to get hurt—at least not by each other. And whatever else happened, whatever to-be-continued bullshit they could get hit with, they were good at living through it. They’d keep each other safe.


End file.
